The Vancouver Community Library is proud to present “Visions & Voices,” a creative art exchange where community members were invited to offer a visual art piece or a written piece. They were then anonymously paired to respond to each other’s work. The original visual art and written pieces are displayed alongside the response pieces, resulting in a truly unique, interdisciplinary exhibition of work.

An opening reception will be held on Friday, April 5 from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Columbia Room in the downtown library during the First Friday Art Walk. The exhibit will be on display in the Columbia Room through April 30, and may be viewed by the public whenever the room is not booked for private use.

Both Toni and Christopher participated in double Visions, a collaboration between Gallery One in Ellensburg and in Blue Sky Center for Photographic Arts in Portland which will be on display throughout April for National Poetry Month. The opening reception for this show also served as the opening for the annual Inland Poetry Prowl.

Double Vision is a selection of photographs by five artists from Blue Sky’s 2018 Pacific Northwest Drawers, an annual juried exhibition featuring portfolios by over forty photographers from Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. The work on view by these five selected artists brings aesthetic play to the forefront, yet as the title indicates, each artist is presenting two distinct visions–aesthetic,and conceptual–in their photographs that push and pull at each other to reveal more serious underlying themes that range from the personal to the universal, along with social commentary and astute reflections upon the unique mechanics of communicating through photography.

In her series Head Shots, Susan Bein embraces the fact that she is bald, and uses the dome of her head as a stage for her whimsical still lifes. Her playful, often humorous, compositions underscore the artist’s comfort within her own skin as she flaunts conventional expectations of what a woman’s body “should” look like. Laura Kurtenbach is also concerned with visual representations of women in her series, Femme Noir. To disrupt and draw attention to the objectification and and narratives of victimization in popular media, she places found images and objects in new photographed compositions. Although aesthetically playful, Kurtenbach’s use of light and shadow is reminiscent of the darker undertones found in vintage film noir. Randi Ganulin similarly reflects upon the power of mass media in Paired Disasters. Her compositions combine photographs of clippings from the Los Angeles Times with scenes from her everyday life. In this way, Ganulin highlights visual patterns that link the microcosm with the macrocosm, illustrating the intrinsic link between public and private life, yet the visual tension still present mirrors the perceived, albeit tenuous, separation between the individual and the collective.

This visual tension and disconnect is also evident in Lucas DeShazer’s photographs of murals that depict the settling of the American West. Many of these public artworks paint a celebratory picture of the past that leaves out the genocide of indigenous peoples and the devastation of natural resources and animal habitats that occurred in the process. DeShazer uses his camera to draw attention to this flattening of history, yet it is fascinating that he uses photography to do so, as the camera literally flattens our three-dimensional reality into two dimensions. Jennifer Zwick experiments with this characteristic of the medium in her images from the series An Exercise in Formal Composition. Using a slightly off-balance right triangle rendered in a variety of materials, she intervenes in otherwise straightforward compositions to expose the artist’s hand in the construction of a photograph.

When viewing photographs, we often suspend disbelief, immersing ourselves in the scene or narrative presented to us while ignoring the two-dimensionality of the photograph or the subjectivity of the person behind the camera. Zwick, as well as the four other artists featured in Double Vision, encourage this consideration of how their photographs are made and how materials and process inform meaning, allowing for engagement with their work on multiple levels.

Inland Poetry Prowl, now in its 4th year, is a weekend-long poetry event hosted by various venues within easy walking distance, in the heart of historic downtown Ellensburg, WA. Celebrating Sylvia Plath, this event offers featured guest readers, craft talks, open mics, live radio broadcast, book fair, and film screening. Gallery One will be a venue for the event on Saturday, April 6.